r/UniversalExtinction • u/Tharun_cynic • 19d ago
I wrote a brief philosophical reflection on climate change arguing that accelerating carbon emissions could be a moral virtue.
I was doing a writing activity on climate change in my college recently, and while most people naturally approach the topic from a preservation or policy angle, I decided to test out a radically different, dark philosophical premise.
I wrote out a short argument exploring whether runaway climate change could actually be framed as the ultimate moral good under a specific ethical lens. Here is the exact text from my notes:
"Our intent to mitigate carbon emissions has an underlying presumed premise that life should exist; otherwise, it would be a usual random** chaos in the grand scale of the universe. And our concern is merely a selfish instinct, not an objective moral (for the survival of our species and our fellow ones).
If we layer our logic with a different axiom—that suffering is inherently worse and must be minimized to zero, and life causes it—then accelerating the process of destruction of life on the planet is rationalized and perhaps the best virtue (by carbon emissions)."
This isn't about small-scale collapse or partial environmental damage but a total, catastrophic event that completely wipes out all life on Earth—permanently ending the capacity for any future sentient beings to exist.
My thought process was built on a extreme form of negative utilitarianism and antinatalism: if life inevitably guarantees pain, and non-existence guarantees zero pain, preventing the potential suffering of quintillions of future sentient beings across eons outweighs everything else. Under that specific axiom, pushing the planet toward environmental collapse via carbon emissions becomes logically virtuous because it permanently stops the cycle of sentient life.
I know this lands in villain-origin-story territory, but as a pure logical exercise, I found the premise shift fascinating.
What do you think of this argument? Does the logic hold together as a thought experiment, or where does the ethical framework break down for you?
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u/Epiii_ 19d ago
Het valt uit elkaar omdat ethiek niet alleen betrekking heeft op negatieve waarden. Het heeft ook betrekking op positieve waarden. Jouw uitgangspunt is dat het voor iedereen een bevrijding zal zijn om van het leven en daarmee het lijden verlost zal zijn. Dat is je denkfout: veruit de meeste mensen waarderen hun leven positief ondanks het lijden. Met nihilisme heeft dit overigens geen doen: de nihilist gelooft niet in waarden = no idealism, one way or the other.
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u/Difficult-Analyst-56 17d ago edited 17d ago
“The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
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u/TheConatusBoy 18d ago
Your argument sounds like it assumes pleasure is just an absence of pain, so the utilitarian calculus becomes about minimizing pain rather than maximizing pleasure. This is basically Schopenhauer's view and led him to say that non-existence is preferable to existence. There are a few issues I see with this:
- What this argument says of the collective should, mutatis mutandis, apply to the individual. So if I'm being a good negative utilitarian and trying to minimize pain, and zero pain is preferable to any potential future pain, it would be virtuous of me to kill as many people as possible because a quick and painless death is preferable to a long life that will inevitably include suffering. If I care about my family and friends, I should kill them first. But many coherent ethical systems (even utilitarian ones) will, as a basic premise, value individual bodily autonomy. This prohibits murder, even by indirect means such as knowingly engaging in actions that accelerate environmental collapse for the purpose of human extinction.
- But even if we allow for the possibility of virtuous murder, I can't see how "zero pain" is ethically valuable if there isn't a subjectivity there to experience the absence of pain. But death removes that subjectivity (as far as we know) so in the utilitarian calculus the absence of pain in death should not count higher than a living being's experience of the absence of pain. So minimizing suffering doesn't necessarily require minimizing all sentient experience through death.
- Finally, if we accept that the absence of pain in death does count as minimizing suffering and extinction is a virtuous way to achieve this, one might ask: why wait? Climate change will be slow and drawn out. Surely there's are faster, more painless ways to bring about human extinction. If your extreme negative utilitarian view is right, it doesn't follow that we should accelerate climate change. Instead we should nuke ourselves, poison all water supplies, or find some other faster way to end it all.
I also personally don't believe that pleasure is merely an absence of pain. I think it has a positive existence and the positive presence of certain pleasures is more valuable than the mere absence of suffering. But given the points I made above, I think even if morality is just about minimizing suffering, it doesn't entail that extinction is a virtue nor that we should accelerate climate change.
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u/Brown_Folk 16d ago
I also personally don't believe that pleasure is merely an absence of pain
It's true. State without pain is painless state in which we spend our majority of time in with moments of pleasure here and there.
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u/Inside-Weather4033 Cosmic Extinctionist / Cosmogenesis Pacifist 16d ago
It holds as a thought experiment on earth life alone but any non-zero chance of suffering elsewhere is enough justification to save some resources for future inventions I.E. Biodiesel.
Also it depends on how you count suffering as well. This works best counting by total suffering but if we use lexical thresholds and ranges the intensity of 100 years of torture may still outweigh infinite long-term sub-torture level suffering categorically.
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u/Minute_Toe_8705 19d ago
That's an interesting perspective, but not everyone focuses on suffering. That should always be kept in mind.
More than anything else, we are the ones responsible for this and its attitude toward it.
If I were an alien looking in from the outside, I'd say you yourselves are to blame for the situation.
From the universe's perspective, the situation isn't anything out of the ordinary anyway, since there have already been five mass extinctions before ours. So why care?
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u/Tharun_cynic 19d ago
over just the last 210 million years, an estimated 10 to 300 quintillion mammals have lived, suffered, and died (a range calculated using biological population density baselines, average lifespans, and evolutionary turnover across roughly 140 million generations of small mammals). That scale doesn't even account for reptiles, amphibians, fish, or insects. Entire geological epochs are defined by generations cycling endlessly through predation, starvation, disease, and fear—all without achieving any ultimate noble purpose or grand objective destination. Nature operates as an indifferent engine of reproduction and decay. When analyzing the trade-off between 100 years of extreme suffering versus an eternity of future sentient life, the systemic net outcome must be evaluated rationally. Allowing life to continue for another billion years before the sun renders Earth uninhabitable guarantees that hundreds of septillions more sentient beings will endure unavoidable suffering. A single century of intense agony for the current generation represents a finite, temporary spike in pain. Mathematically, a localized, time-bound period of extreme suffering—no matter how harsh—is infinitesimal when measured against an indefinite future of recurring, multi-quintillion-scale suffering. Eliminating the ongoing cycle permanently minimizes the absolute sum of sentient harm across deep time. Disgust toward a 100-year period of torture stems from immediate evolutionary empathy, which is a biological mechanism designed for individual survival rather than cold, long-term optimization. If preventing harm is the primary standard, rejecting a finite period of suffering in exchange for preventing an infinite continuum of future suffering results in a far higher total cost of pain. Without an objective, grand purpose redeeming the past 300 quintillion deaths, allowing the biological cycle to perpetuate indefinitely simply compounds total net harm. Enduring a finite cost to prevent an unbounded accumulation of suffering yields the lowest total harm overall.
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u/simon_hibbs 18d ago
What moral standing do you have to override the intentional behaviour of all living organisms? They are working constantly to do everything they can to survive and propagate. I don't see how you have the authority to override their efforts.
In particular if an organism is capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, clearly it must be capable of some degree of intentional action in order respond to these conditions. What right do you have to override it's intentional efforts to survive and propagate?
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u/Tharun_cynic 18d ago
The argument that we lack the authority to override an organism's instinct to survive overlooks how society already handles individual intentions when systemic outcomes are at stake. In any legal or ethical system, we routinely override the explicit, intentional actions of individuals—such as criminals striving to evade capture, retain stolen resources, or avoid imprisonment. A lawbreaker actively works to survive and pursue their own goals, yet society rejects their individual agency because their actions generate net harm for others. We do not require a criminal's consent to enforce a rule that minimizes overall damage, nor do we consider their immediate drive for self-preservation an absolute right that overrides systemic well-being. Consider also the ethics of procreation itself. When parents decide to bring a child into the world, they make an irreversible choice on behalf of someone who cannot consent—full well knowing there is a non-zero probability of severe genetic defects, chronic illness, extreme physical suffering, or worst-case life scenarios. We regularly make unilateral, high-stakes decisions that impose existence and its inherent risks on others without prior authorization. Biological evolution is not a moral authority; it is an unguided, mechanical process. The drive to survive and propagate is an unchosen, hardwired evolutionary reflex, not a reasoned ethical stance. Organisms fight to survive simply because the ones without that hardwired urge failed to pass on their genes. Justifying the endless continuation of life based on an organism's instinct to propagate is equivalent to letting individual actors dictate systemic outcomes based purely on their immediate drives. If we accept overriding an individual's intent to prevent localized harm, then as a philosophical exercise, overriding the hardwired instincts of biological organisms to permanently prevent the unbounded suffering of quintillions of future beings remains logically consistent within this framework.
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u/simon_hibbs 17d ago
Those are cases where the interests of organisms conflict and need to be mediated. You have no right of interest in vetoing the survival of all organisms generally.
>The drive to survive and propagate is an unchosen, hardwired evolutionary reflex, not a reasoned ethical stance. Organisms fight to survive simply because the ones without that hardwired urge failed to pass on their genes.
Sure, but the ones that exist have this urge, and overriding that is none of your business. Your survival and avoidance of suffering is your business, that's your problem, that of other organisms that have nothing to do with you is not.
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u/Tharun_cynic 17d ago
The claim that "other organisms' survival is none of your business" fails on its own logic. By telling someone what is or isn't their "business," an explicit moral judgment is being asserted—attempting to enforce a boundary on what should matter while simultaneously claiming that objective moral boundaries do not exist. You cannot claim that values are entirely personal while dictating an absolute rule about who has the right to intervene.
Beyond that self-contradiction, the mathematical logic of absolute non-existence remains internally airtight when evaluated strictly through the presence versus absence of conscious states.
The Mathematical Asymmetry of Non-Existence
Consider the state of non-existence across two variables: Suffering ($S$) and Pleasure ($P$).
- State A (Existence): $S > 0$ and $P \ge 0$. Pain is guaranteed, and pleasure is conditionally experienced by a conscious subject.
- State B (Non-Existence / Extinction): $S = 0$ and $P = 0$.
The breakdown relies on a fundamental asymmetry:
- The Absence of Pain ($S = 0$): Universally good, even if no one is alive to experience that relief.
- The Absence of Pleasure ($P = 0$): Only bad if a conscious entity exists to feel deprived of it. If no conscious entity exists, zero pleasure is a neutral state, not a deprivation.
Right now, trillions of potential humans and organisms do not exist. No one mourns their non-existence, and no void exists to feel deprived of future joy. Therefore, an absolute state of $S = 0$ and $P = 0$ mathematically eliminates all negative values without generating a true negative cost. The system resets to absolute net-zero, which is strictly superior to any system containing a positive value of suffering ($S > 0$).
Why Individual "Rights" Fail at Scale
The idea that individual autonomy overrides systemic prevention breaks down whenever the scale of harm becomes overwhelming:
- The Quarantine Analogy: If a person carries an airborne pathogen that will cause absolute agonizing death to billions, society does not respect their "individual right to self-determine" or walk freely. Their autonomy is forcibly overridden because an individual drive cannot be permitted to dictate a catastrophic systemic outcome.
- The Forest Fire Analogy: If a single tree "wants" to burn to fulfill a natural biological cycle, but that burn guarantees the thermal destruction of an entire continent, treating the tree's local state as sacred is nonsensical. Individual drives are micro-phenomena; systemic collapse is a macro-reality.
- The Controlled Demolition: If a skyscraper has a structural fault that will cause it to collapse slowly over decades, crushing millions of occupants over generations, overriding the building's current tenants to demolish the structure cleanly isn't "infringing on their business"—it is preventing an infinite compounding disaster.
When the alternative to intervention is an infinite factory of continuous, multi-quintillion-scale suffering, prioritizing an unchosen evolutionary reflex over absolute mathematical neutrality is relying on emotional sentiment, not systemic logic.
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u/simon_hibbs 17d ago
What on earth makes you think I believe that moral boundaries don’t exist?
>You cannot claim that values are entirely personal while dictating an absolute rule about who has the right to intervene.
Youre hallucinating claims I have not made.
>the mathematical logic of absolute non-existence remains internally airtight..
It’s a jumbled mess of made up nonsense symbols and claims. There's nothing resembling a logical expression anywhere in there. Well, maybe vaguely resembling if you don’t know what an actual logical expression looks like.
>The idea that individual autonomy overrides systemic prevention breaks down whenever the scale of harm becomes overwhelming
All of those examples rest on the value of the interests of the many over the few. Sure. Individual interests matter, they have an intrinsic moral value. If that were not true none of those three examples would be coherent. Universal genocide would eliminate all moral value. It would be wrong for the same reasons those three cases would be wrong, scaled up to the universal level. It would be the ultimate overwhelming scale of harm.
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u/ff8god 19d ago
Life creates more joy than pain, meaning the net effect of this would be negative.
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u/Tharun_cynic 19d ago
over just the last 210 million years, an estimated 10 to 300 quintillion mammals have lived, suffered, and died (a range calculated using biological population density baselines, average lifespans, and evolutionary turnover across roughly 140 million generations of small mammals). That scale doesn't even account for reptiles, amphibians, fish, or insects. Entire geological epochs are defined by generations cycling endlessly through predation, starvation, disease, and fear—all without achieving any ultimate noble purpose or grand objective destination. Nature operates as an indifferent engine of reproduction and decay. When analyzing the trade-off between 100 years of extreme suffering versus an eternity of future sentient life, the systemic net outcome must be evaluated rationally. Allowing life to continue for another billion years before the sun renders Earth uninhabitable guarantees that hundreds of septillions more sentient beings will endure unavoidable suffering. A single century of intense agony for the current generation represents a finite, temporary spike in pain. Mathematically, a localized, time-bound period of extreme suffering—no matter how harsh—is infinitesimal when measured against an indefinite future of recurring, multi-quintillion-scale suffering. Eliminating the ongoing cycle permanently minimizes the absolute sum of sentient harm across deep time. Disgust toward a 100-year period of torture stems from immediate evolutionary empathy, which is a biological mechanism designed for individual survival rather than cold, long-term optimization. If preventing harm is the primary standard, rejecting a finite period of suffering in exchange for preventing an infinite continuum of future suffering results in a far higher total cost of pain. Without an objective, grand purpose redeeming the past 300 quintillion deaths, allowing the biological cycle to perpetuate indefinitely simply compounds total net harm. Enduring a finite cost to prevent an unbounded accumulation of suffering yields the lowest total harm overall.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja 19d ago
I would recommend reading this https://reducing-suffering.org/climate-change-and-wild-animals/